- Feb 2024
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"Well, but Jesus," Ballinger said. "I mean he's older than I am, kid. He's - he's a lot older than I am." The number of years seemed to dawn on him as he spoke; it filled him with a strange, heart-shaking heat. "Honey, nineteen years. When he was my age, I was only two years older than you are now.""I don't see what that has to do with anything," she said."Melanie, I'll be forty-five all the way in December. I'm a young forty- four.""I know when your birthday is, Dad.""Well, good God, this guy's nineteen years older than your own father."She said, "I've grasped the numbers. Maybe you should go ahead and put Mom on.""Melanie, you couldn't pick somebody a little closer to my age? Some snot-nosed forty-year-old?""Stop it," she said. "Please, Daddy. I know what I'm doing.""Do you know how old he's going to be when your baby is ten? Do you? Have you given that any thought at all?"
If someone is 63 years old in 2024 (I know this story was realized before, but let's do the math together), this means William must have been born in 1961 or earlier than that. Melanie is about to be 23 years old, meaning she was born at the beginning of either 2000 or 2001. This is an age gap of 41 years which can be extremely challenging for young adults to accept later once William is not able to take care of himself due to his age. However, what impacted me the most was not how old William is, but that he is older than Ballinger himself and that is concerning to me as the reader and for him as a father. However, Ballinger did not do such a great job trying to understand Melanie’s situation and quickly decided to drown her with questions, doubts, and preoccupations that she probably had already thought about me, and Melanie may not be ready to speak about it now.
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"I don't remember. Are you measuring yourself by that?""You waited six months, and you do too remember. And this is five months. And we're not measuring anything. William and I have known each other longer than five months, but we've been together - you know, as a couple - five months. And I'm almost twenty-three, which is two years older than Mom was. And don't tell me it was different when you guys did it.""No," he heard himself say. "It's pretty much the same, I imagine?"
In this section, I noticed the dynamic both Ballinger and Melanie have is very odd, especially the way she assumes telling her father about her significant other when the truth is the contrary. By the beginning of the conversation, we can already see that Melanie and Ballinger have a close relationship with each other, but Melanie seems to have grown distant from her family and made some choices she knew her parents would not be proud of once she told them the truth. However, she has an idea; she can start the conversation by slowly introducing her father Coombs by talking a little bit more about him and quickly assuming they already had this conversation before which does not give her father the chance to think properly about the situation except to accept it. That strategy did not work for long once her father started to figure out how serious her relationship was with Coombs as well as how impossible it was to share Melanie his problems with his wife, Mary. Ballinger and Melanie seemed to have a close relationship with each other, but this situation may drift the, away for a long time.
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The truth was that he had news of his own to tell. Almost a week ago, he and Mary had agreed on a separation. Some time for them both to sort things out. They had decided not to say anything about it to Melanie until she arrived. But now Melanie had said that she was bringing someone with her.
Here is when the conflict of the story starts to grow, when Melanie decides to confess to her father the age gap between her and her fiancée and how Ballinger tries to find a way to tell his daughter about his temporary separation from his wife, Mary. However, Melanie's situation seemed greater than his problem at the end of the story, so he decided to not tell her what he wanted to tell her before and just tried to analyze what just happened during his conversation with her. Meanwhile, poor Mary has no idea what kind of problem her daughter has gotten into while she is happily gardening in her front yard, ignorant of the whole situation. Although Ballinger and Mary were planning to get separated for quite some time, they seemed to have mutual respect and their interactions with each other were friendly but not romantic. Will Melanie’s situation help both Ballinger and Mary be closer to each other if they try to find a way to help their daughter or will it just worsen their marriage in the end?
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